British Marine Painting

by Unknown

No doubt this is partly due to the fact that British art has concerned itself very greatly with what may be called the physical characteristics of the country. A considerable proportion of our painters have been devoted students of nature, and have occupied themselves with records of British scenery, and of those subtle effects of atmosphere and illumination which are the product of the variable British climate. Responsive themselves to the charm of their surroundings, they have catered for a public which appreciates the beauties of nature and likes to see them realized pictorially; lovers themselves of the land in which they live, they have striven to please the many people who are possessed by a similar sentiment and wish to have about them pictures in which this sentiment is agreeably reflected. No record of British scenery could be complete, and no appeal to British sentiment could be effective, if our artists ignored the wide variety of subjects which the sea offers them.

For the sea is with us a tradition, and the love of the sea is one of the strongest of our national instincts. Because we live on an island the sea is at the same time our protection from those who might seek to do us harm and our means of communication with the rest of the world; it safeguards us against dangers to which other less fortunately situated countries are constantly exposed, and yet it puts us directly in touch with even the most remote and apparently inaccessible peoples. Therefore we regard it naturally as a friendly influence in the lives of us all. But we owe it a debt of gratitude also for the effect it has had upon our British art. It is from our insular climate, from the mists and moisture which the sea brings, that those atmospheric qualities come which make the study of nature in the British Isles such a never-ending delight. It is the surrounding sea that encourages the rich growth of our vegetation, and that gives to our landscape its wealth of detail and its ample variety of colour. As the sea influences the manner of our national life, so it influences the quality, the sentiment, and the method of our art, helping us to build up a school which is insular in its merit and its expression, and national in its feeling and its intention.

Yet, curiously enough, in the earlier period of British art history the names of few painters are recorded who perceived the pictorial interest of the sea or tried to realize its beauties. Indeed, at the beginning no attention was given to the study of open-air nature; landscape painting was not attempted seriously, and the study of atmospheric effects was generally disregarded. The artists of that time occupied themselves mainly with portraits—digressing occasionally into figure compositions—and took little account of anything but the purely human interest in art. They worked for the glorification of their patrons, to adorn the houses of the great, or to prove themselves good sons of the Church, not to bring about the conversion of the people who were insensible to nature’s charm.

It would be scarcely fair, however, to accuse the earlier British artists of insensibility because they worked in this manner within circumscribed limits; they only followed, after all, what was the fashion of the schools in other countries. In Italy, for instance, during the splendours of the Renaissance, the study of landscape for its own sake was as little thought of as it was in Great Britain at the time of the Tudors. Many of the Italian masters introduced landscape backgrounds in their figure compositions, but it was landscape of a formal and conventionalized kind, a weaving together of details to form a pattern which was used merely to fill space or to add something to the point of the pictured story. It was never landscape seen and set down as the motive of the painting; at best it was only a sort of still life.

But in Italy at that period the mission of the artist was very exactly defined, and even if he had been inclined to escape from the limitations imposed upon his activities, the custom of the time would have been too strong for him. He was the servant of the great noble and the obedient assistant of the Church, he decorated palaces, and he painted altar-pieces, he recorded scenes from ancient or contemporary history, and incidents in the lives of the saints. Neither the noble nor the churchman wanted from him studies of Italian scenery, or desired that he should show how he was impressed by the brightness of sunlight or by the glory of an evening sky. The severest discouragement would have awaited him if he had attempted anything so unconventional; he might even have incurred penalties as a man of unseemly and heterodox opinions.

For a long while British artists worked under restrictions hardly less rigid. What was demanded of them they supplied, but the demand that they should show to the public what nature is like was slow in coming. Word pictures of nature there were in plenty; a chorus of poets extolled her charm, but no one seemed to perceive that what they found so inspiring in their verse could be visualized and made apparent by the painters. When Herrick wrote:

“I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers”

British artists were looking to Van Dyck as their leader, and were striving, as he did, to immortalize their contemporaries or to tell in paint purely human stories. The brooks and blossoms, birds and flowers did not claim their consideration or provide them with material for popular canvases, and it did not occur to them to paint the groves and twilights, the damasked meadows and the pebbly streams, which Herrick loved so well.

In fact, it was not until the eighteenth century that the representation of landscape subjects began to be recognized as a legitimate sphere of artistic activity. Even then what was required was a very dry and commonplace kind of topographical illustration—a certain number of people had developed an interest in British scenery and in the archæological relics which were to be found in different parts of the country, and accordingly it became the fashion to collect pictures of famous “views” and of ruined abbeys and other ancient buildings. But in producing these pictures little scope was allowed to the artist for the exercise of his imagination or for the expression of any æsthetic sentiment. The more precise and careful he was in his statement of fact, the more accurate his paintings were as portraits of the places or objects chosen, the better were his clients satisfied. He had to do what photography does now—he had to make a more or less literal diagram of his subject with as much of the detail as he could contrive to set down and with as little display as possible of his personal taste or fancy.

However, out of this limited and mechanical beginning grew very quickly a school of landscape practice which substituted the wider study of nature for the record of topographical realities. A number of artists broke away from restrictions by which they felt themselves to be hampered, and they found a considerable section of the public prepared to countenance them in their effort to attain freer and more significant expression. They brought a new spirit into the art of the country, a spirit of inquiry and investigation, and they taught people to look more closely at nature’s manifestations and to interest themselves intelligently in her elusive suggestions. In other words, they destroyed a convention which had been generally accepted, and in securing freedom for themselves to follow their personal inclinations towards a more rational treatment of nature they gained the sympathetic support of the many art lovers who had discovered how cramping the convention was, and how seriously it stood in the way of the right kind of development and progress.